by Donald Goddard

On the first wall, before actually getting into
the exhibition, was a small picture, perhaps an old postcard, of a building falling
down with an inscription at the bottom reading, "It's a great life if you don't
weaken." The image is one thing, the legend another, the conundrum is the same.
One and two.

And so it was throughout the show. Everything structured, in
sequence, hopeful; hopeful, that is, that the structure and the sequence will
continue, knowing they won't, at least not together. Washington Cathedral
has two grids of old colorized postcards of the world's sixth largest Gothic
cathedral, begun in 1907, as it might have been completed (though it wasn't until
1990). They are quite beautiful in the varieties of light they emit, like a mosaic.
The last space in each of the grids, in the lower right-hand corner, is left
blank, as if for what actually happened, though for it to be in sequence the
new card would have to be faked in the technology of the old cards--another kind
of lie conflating future and past. Time is also strangely compressed in Palindrome,
which lines up five front pages of British and Dutch newspapers from February
20, 2002 (or the palindromic 20.02 2002 in the European shorthand for date).

Each of these pages in the simple grid of five has a grid within
it for pictures and texts, different from the other five, meant to impress the
news on individual readers of events that took place the day before, in other
words, the newspapers have influenced people in one moment of time with things
that happened in previous moments of time, and now we are looking at what they
might have been impressed by, or not caring at all but simply looking at the
patterns, the art, which is all we can do anyway because our information is now
so cut off from its origins. Whatever it was was important, and the grids and
palindrome hold that in suspension.

The numbers 20.02
2002 derive, in fact, from numbers that the wonderful Belgian conceptual artist
Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) had stenciled on a wall of his studio in Düsseldorf.
Dean's Chère petite soeur is based on a Broodthaers film of a postcard
he found that shows a boat in a storm. The film combines positive and negative
versions of the same image and uses the salutation and text as title and subtitles.
Dean names the boat Chère petite soeur and transforms the scene into
a sequence of two scenes drawn in chalk on two enormous grids of blackboards,
with the boat going down in the right half of the diptych as in a storyboard
for a film.

One and two; there are no other possibilities.
Is three that the boat would go down even farther, or that it would come up again?
Those are only possible refinements. The tragedy occurs despite the structure,
but is also suspended by the structure, the boat itself being a structure, like
the cathedral and the newspapers, that makes its way, or not, through adversity.

Then there is a 13-minute 16mm
movie Dean made in Broodthaers' Düsseldorf studio and called Section
Cinema, 2002 after Broodthaers' name for his imaginary museum. It is a sequence
of several-second shots of walls and corners of the windowless basement interior
in which the only remains of Broodthaers are his stenciled signs for his demonstration
of the world: the numbers 0, 1, 2, 4, and 12; Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 4; the words
"Silence", "Museum", "Musée". A lightbulb
in one take is like the sun of this solar system. But there are ship models here
too, which Broodthaers no doubt would have liked, and furniture being stored
by a local museum.

The film continues in a loop,
as does another film, called Fernsehturm, shown in another space, which
takes place over 44 minutes inside the restaurant of the famous TV Tower erected
near the Alexanderplatz in eastern Berlin in 1969. It is only barely perceptible
that the restaurant itself revolves within the spherical shape elevated high
above the city, and that the view keeps changing for the patrons seated so satisfyingly
at tables around the outer edge. But we see the outside only vaguely, and only
from the inside in panoramic shots usually set up to take in several tables and
the slanted structure of the windows, then moving occasionally to waiters in
their routines, a performer playing an inane tune on an electronic organ, individual
groups of people at their tables. It is difficult to make out faces or words,
but there is a general din of voices, clatter of dishes, and background of generic
music. Though the film shows continuously, there is a beginning, when a waitress
sets the tables, and an end, when the same waitress clears the tables. There
is daylight at first, then sunset, as the interior gets darker, then night, and
finally closing time, when the interior lights come up and the patrons leave,
all as the restaurant slowly turns. The restaurant is a structure, like a ship,
a cathedral, or a museum, that accommodates human desire and passage.

The experience is a completely
familiar European one in all its details of movement, sequence, interchange,
and gesture. The gathering of people is warm and comforting, not particularly
alienating. Nothing surprising or out of the ordinary happens; the schedule is
followed. The space goes around and returns to its past. Yet the restaurant is
totally divorced from its surroundings (which only vaguely exist through the
windows), raised up high into the air above the earth just as Broodthaers' studio
is lowered into the earth. The tower represents a curious, contradictory sense
of community in a "socialist" society of the later 20th century extended into
the 21st century, just as the Washington Cathedral represents a contradictory
sense of community in a "democratic" society of the early 20th century, extending
from the 13th century. Both are fortresses against the trepidations of history.